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Networking Quick Tips

Quick Tips: Zooming the right way

In this Quick Tip, Brian Cooley shows you the right way to zoom in on a subject in order to create emphasis and intimacy.

1:24 / May 21, 2008

Transcript

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>> I'm Brian Cooley with a quick tip on taking better pictures with any digital camera using zoom the right way. Now I'm not a big fan of zoom lenses in many cases. When you zoom in strongly on something the camera gets very shaky and hard to hold, and zoom lenses tend to gather less light when they are zoomed in on something than when they're pulled back wide. So a lot of things go wrong when you zoom in. Now typically you take a picture of somebody by walking up to them, getting the composition you want, say cheese, and you get the picture. And it's not bad. The background though is kind of busy, it distracts from the whole photo. So what if I do this. I take a couple of steps back, and then I zoom in to get the same basic composition. Now you get a little bit of a foreshortening effect that puts the background somewhat out of the emphasis, and brings our subject in. It's a more intimate portrait. It's an old portrait photographer's trick from way back, and you can use it whether you have a manual zoom ring on your camera, or one of these little switches here to go back and forth, wide to tele. Use the telephoto a little bit, and you just back up. You'll end up with a much nicer portrait, and by the way it's not just for staged photos. Try this technique when you're taking candids at a family gathering or a party. It works in many cases, and it's really a nice way to get a photo of a person that really pops and tells a message.
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Thanks for joining me for this quick tip on using zoom the right way.
^M00:01:22
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